Dear LUGers,
I've been looking around and have tested four dedicated HTML editors including those recommended on list. I've only used each for a short amount of time but have formed some initial opinions.
BlueFish: A nice little app that actually seems quite powerful, has tools for php and sql. It has function to test your pages in various popular browsers, but no internal preview feature and although has a lot of features to speed up coding it doesn't have a WYSIWYG interface. With neither of these you're left pretty blind as to what the page will look like without having a browser open next to it and constantly refreshing the page. Has pretty good support for CSS and a dubious spell checker and word count along with customisable toolbars so you can have your most commonly used features to hand.
Quanta Plus: Seems a similar but more grown up editor than BlueFish. This one has a nice preview pane feature so you can have a split screen between the source and what the page will look like. It recognises and highlights PHP code and web sites are managed as "Projects" which is a nice touch. You can also get plugins for the editor some of which look very useful. However, still no WYSIWYG editor.
Amaya: W3C's offer of a web editor. This one boasts support for XHTML, MathML, SVG, SMIL and CSS. The majority of these I don't currently use on a regular basis (apart from CSS) but could well prove useful in the future. Amaya was the first WYSIWYG I saw and I wasn't impressed. Compared to what I've been used to in Dreamweaver its clunky and often has little resemblence to final rendered appearance of web pages. I didn't feel very happy with using Amaya. All of these editors are technically a work in progress, but this one felt like it needed a bit more progress!
Mozilla Composer: I've just recently tried this one, it has a much better WYSIWYG interface than Amaya. I really like the feel of it, seems like a much more polished interface. However, it's not as hot on features for hardcore editing as many of the others and lacks scope for a more technically minded developer. There's no highlighting of HTML tags, no recognition of PHP code and I can see me getting frustrated with a lack of flexibility.
In conclusion, taking Macromedia Dreamweaver MX as a benchmark (a status which I personally believe it deserves, despite its propriatory origins) choosing a Linux based editor is going to be a compromise. The Mozilla Composer WYSIWYG interface is very nice but Quanta Plus has more scope for serious coding. None of the editors I've seen have the advanced features for managing web sites that I'd like and I'm very much left to do things by myself - which is nice but time consuming.
If anyone knows of another editor that I could look at I'd love to hear about it, but short of Macromedia going open source or porting to Linux properly I think I'm a bit stuck as to what to use for the moment, I'll just have to make do with what's available. If I had the programming skills I'd love to start an open source project of my own, or contribute to another - but unfortunately I don't. Yet.
-- Ben "tola" Francis